Most online design companies are either expensive and bad, or cheap and bad. Design crowd connects businesses with talented designers – just like it should be! DesignCrowd is an Australian company that makes it easy to crowd-source designs, and it's rapidly making a name for itself in the international market, because of how good it's doing its job.

Does crowdsourcing work? The rise of Designcrowd, with backing by angel investors and venture capital, is strong evidence it can make for a thriving business model. And Lynch, the gifted CEO, is showcasing it through some very public design campaigns -- well outside of Australia.

Crowdsourcing – or involving multitudes of people in a project – is not as new as many might think. For decades, much before the Internet came into being, The Oxford English Dictionary was driven by thousands of people writing in with word suggestions, etymology, usage and more. In more recent times, the human genome project used crowdsourcing, and leveraged the computing power of thousands.

More than 5,000 entrants have submitted designs to the latest DesignCrowd contest. Using the innovative Sydney-based DesignCrowd crowdsourcing service, TimesSquare.com, has offered up a $10,000 prize for anyone who can provide a new logo. Check out the current logo, it really needs to be changed!

The Australian venture capital firm Starfish Ventures has invested $3 million in DesignCrowd, according to a media release dispatched on Thursday. The Australian start-up, a design crowdsourcing community with more than 40,000 registered graphic designers, plans to use the new investment to launch two new services in 2012 and to expand its client base outside Australia.